“You always land on your feet,” Nah says. “Always.”
I reach out and comb my fingers through her long, black hair. “Not anymore, I don’t think. I’m beginning to realize I don’t know very much.”
She snorts. “Welcome to the club.”
“But you’re okay with not knowing. I wish I could be like that. Could like mystery. Ben’s favorite words are I don’t know. I HATE those words. I think the not-knowing is starting to drive me crazy.”
She sighs. “There’s something I don’t know that’s driving me crazy. Something I haven’t told you.”
Oh god.
Nah smiles a little. “Not a bad thing. I saw Mom. Twice.”
“In a dream?”
Nah has very vivid dreams. We used to draw pictures of them when we were little.
“No. After the wave, I saw her doing yoga in her room—fish pose. And then I knew she was dead. She didn’t say anything, but I knew. And then she came to my room after I found Dad’s emails. And she was doing a headstand.”
I open my mouth, but she shakes her head before I can say it. “I wasn’t high. This was real.”
Today I will suspend my disbelief. I will let there be a mystery. And I will not think about why Mom didn’t visit me.
“It was just those two times?” I ask.
She nods. “But when I woke up here, I realized something. The headstand—her legs were in the same pose as the Hanged Man.”
“That sounds scary.”
“It’s not. In tarot, the Hanged Man is dangling from a tree the way we used to on the jungle gym when we were kids—from his knees, not his neck. He’s just hanging out. And he seems, like, enlightened. The card is all about looking at the world from a different perspective.” She takes my hand. “Astronauts are the most badass Hanged Men, I think.”
“Hanged Women,” I correct. She smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It never reaches her eyes anymore.
“I think Mom was telling me I need to look at the world in a new way. She couldn’t give me a reading, so she became the reading.” Her eyes slide to the window, the snow. “I just don’t know how.”
And I realize: I don’t know, either.
“All the things I don’t understand—about people and feelings and how to be human … You seem to know already, in your bones,” I say. “I bet if you just meditated a few times upside down or closed your eyes and listened to the wind, you’d have your answers. For me to find anything out, I need to be in a space suit in zero gravity. And to get there, I have to acquire several advanced degrees and have the most dangerous jobs known to humankind. After beating out thousands of people to get those jobs, I have to live four hundred kilometers above Earth—just to figure out what you can in your bedroom.” I squeeze her hand. “So who’s really the genius here?”
“I’m not a genius,” she says.
“But you are. In your way, Hannah, you’re brilliant. I might know how to be an astronaut someday, but you know how to be a human today.”
Nah’s hand goes to the little diamond around her neck and she takes in a shuddering breath. I can see the missing in every Karalis splotch on her face.
“You told Drew you love him. I know you did.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“That’s brave, Nah. Telling him. After Micah, and Mom and Dad. You could say it. Even though you knew you could lose each other in a second. You almost did lose each other. But you still said it.”
“I broke up with him,” she says. “Just now.”
I run my hand over her hair. “Why?”
“My heart’s tired.”
“That’s very unscientific,” I say, after a little while in the silence. “But I get it. That’s how it feels. These days.”
She nods. We lie, watching the snow whip past the window. It was sixty-eight degrees in LA today. I checked.
“Did Ben tell you he loves you?”
I nod. And there must be something on my face that her genius self reads because those lines we both get when we’re confused appear between her eyebrows. “You … you haven’t said it back to him?”
It’s a relief to confess.
“My heart’s tired,” I whisper.
I’ll never forget the agony on Drew’s face when he arrived at the hospital, certain she was dead. The way a part of my insides started to tear into pieces when I felt my sister’s pulse, like it was in a distant galaxy and would disappear at any moment. No. No. I can’t do that again, not with anyone else.
“But you love him. I know you do. It’s so obvious.” She stares at me, hard. “You do.”
“Every time I look at him, all I can think about is how it will feel when he dies.”
Nah slips her hand into mine. She understands.
I look into her green eyes, and I see Dad. “I don’t want to be a hungry ghost.”
“What’s that?”
“Buddhist thing. How we try to fill the empty places inside us with people or things, but it doesn’t work.”
“Things like pills,” she says.
I nod. “And boys.”
The snow falls. The hospital gets quieter. The nurse comes in to check her IV. Nate drops off flowers. Says good night. The room is dark and quiet.
The snow falls. My sister is alive. I will be her bronze angel tonight. Watching.
I think Nah is asleep, but then she says, “I’m such a loser.”
“You’re actually in very good company,” I say. I pull the blanket up higher, tuck it around us. “Ben Franklin was an addict in later life. That shouldn’t have surprised me, because he misbehaved quite a bit in his day. And the DEA raided Monticello back in the eighties because Jefferson had poppies planted there.”
“The Founding Fathers got high?”
I nod. “It might account for them forgetting the rights of over half the population during the Continental Congress. Maybe all these years, we’ve just been cleaning up the messes of the most famous users in American history.”
Nah snorts. “Leave it to you to give me a history lesson after an overdose.”
“You can learn anywhere.”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice soft. “I guess you can.”
I search her eyes, that bit of Dad in her forever. “Are you mad, Nah?”
“At what?”
“That we saved you?”
“Do you want the honest answer?” she asks, her voice faint as her pulse had been a few hours before.
“Yes.”
Her eyes fill. “I don’t know.”
There are many stories from people who survived the wave, how they fought to hold on to the people they loved. Daughters and husbands and moms. They tried so hard not to let go. But it took them anyway. They didn’t stand a chance against all that force and acceleration. Against nature. But Dad said the long shot is the best shot. So.
I wrap my whole self around my sister as she falls asleep. Hold on tight.
36
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 6 December
Earth Time (EST): 00:48